Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I have given a lot of thought to this, and I appreciate what the leader said about health care. I am the only practicing physician in the Senate. We have one of our colleagues who is no longer practicing. But it struck me, as a physician, that what we should do in health care ought to be what our patients want us to do. What is it the people--the very personal aspect of health care--would like to see?

There is no question we have big problems in health care. There is dissatisfaction in the insurance side, with Medicare and Medicaid, and the lack of access. But what is it we should be talking about that will solve the insecurities, the problems, the concerns of the American people? I wish to go through with you a little list of items I think individuals in this country would agree with on how we ought to handle health care.

First, we ought to make sure health care is available to everybody in this country and that it is affordable. We will spend, this year, $2.4 trillion on health care, or 17.5 percent of our GDP. Yet we know that out of that $2.4 trillion, $700 billion doesn't help anybody get well and doesn't prevent anybody from getting sick. We now have an administration that wants to spend another $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years, or $130 billion more per year, to try to solve this problem. The money is not the problem. We know, in Medicare alone, there is $70 billion to $80 billion worth of fraud and in Medicaid $40 billion worth of fraud and that is in the government-run programs.

The second thing we ought to make sure of is that everybody can be covered. We can do that with the money we have today. We can make sure everybody gets covered. The other thing we ought to do is make sure everybody who has a plan they like today can keep it. After all, health care isn't about health care, it is about individuals, it is about persons, what they desire, what they need, and when they need it.

We can, in fact, fix the fraud, waste, and abuse in health care. It is something we can do. Not long ago, we discovered we had one wheelchair that had been sold multiple times by one durable medical equipment company in Florida, but it was never delivered, and they collected $5 million from Medicare for that one wheelchair. That is just the tip of the iceberg of the fraud.

Another thing we know we need to do, and that patients want us to do--because we have a government-run system for 60 percent of our health care today--is we ought to prioritize wellness and prevention. Do you realize Medicare doesn't pay for wellness and prevention and Medicaid doesn't pay for wellness and prevention? So we don't have wellness and prevention. What that leads to is additional chronic disease, which we then will have to manage--a disease we could have prevented.

Another issue I was thinking about--especially with my patients--is thatsome are employed and have insurance through their employer, but those who are employed but don't have insurance or they own their own business or they are self-employed, they get a totally different look from the IRS about their health expenses. If your employer pays for it, there are no taxes, but if you have to pay for it or you are self-employed or you have your own business, you have to take dollars, after tax, and pay for your health care. So one of the things we have to do is equalize that so everybody is treated the same under the Tax Code for their health care.

How does that work out? Well, if your employer provides your health care, you get about $2,700 worth of tax benefits a year. But if you provide your health care, you get only about $100 worth of tax benefit. It is ironic because it is so unfair to say you don't get the same benefit under the Tax Code because you happen to either work in a place that doesn't provide health insurance or you own your own business or you are self-employed.

The other issue I thought about that my patients would want is: What should we not do? What should we make sure we do not do? I think about my patients, and the last thing they want is more government involvement in their health care. We heard the minority leader talk about what happens in Canada when you get sick and how you have to wait and what happens in England when you get sick and are denied care because you are not worth it because of your age. Health care delayed, in the case of the lady he mentioned from Canada, is death. Health care denied, as he mentioned about the gentleman from England, is death--for both those individuals.

If you think about the government-run health care programs today, talk about Indian health care, a government-run program that is so substandard nobody would embrace it. If you think about VA health care--although it is improving through the years--it is still far below the standards of health care in this country. Then, if you think about the fraud in Medicaid and Medicare and the hoops everybody has to jump through, in terms of those two programs, I think most Americans would say: Let's fix it so everybody can have what they need and let's make sure everybody gets covered and let's make sure we do that without having government bureaucrats deciding what, when, and how we get our care.

The final issue is we know one of the problems we have today--besides a recession--is this huge amount of people who are unemployed. Yet we also know 72 percent of all new job creation comes from small business. A proposal is floating out there that we are going to tax you, through a pay-or-play mandate, if you don't provide health insurance for your employees, and you are going to pay into the government to do that. That will kill job creation in this country.

We can fix health care. It needs to be fixed. Everybody agrees with that. How we fix it is the most important issue we are going to deal with in the next 2 years. The idea that we can come to a solution of this in the next couple months, with the complexity we have, will assure us of one of two things: One is a government bureaucratic takeover of health care, or a piece of legislation that will deny care, which will put somebody in between a patient and their doctor and will either delay care or, in fact, will raise the cost of health care.

As somebody who has practiced for 25 years in the field of medicine, obstetrics, and allergy, what I know is that we have a good health care system if we can get the government out of it and not put more government into it. What we need is fairness in access, fairness in the Tax Code, and allow the true American experiment to work in health care as we have had it work in so many other things.